See notes: 1. Badlands wallboard and Yves Klein blue.
1. Badlands camping trip 99. Return without fear; you will not fall into the bottomless crevices or encounter hostility from the bison... nor will any of the 6 or 8 campers following your lead think anything of the fact that there's no one else in the park and no potable water within a day's walk.
2. Return to the Walker for an Yve's Klein retrospective.
Don't look at anything for long enough to see what you're looking at. Now read how you should look at it through my directions:
So past the foam flowers and a few things on walls (in frames or on shelves), there will be that horizon again. Formed this time by the excess of color and repetition, and then the lack thereof--lack of any thing but falling up the short-cut set of longer stairwells, trying to get past the rest of more of the too much, but the remodel made it almost impossible to skip part of an exhibit.. inevitably have to walk through one extra gallery and then another-- probably most likely almost approached by a gallery guard but the almost-approached was sufficient re-direction: past gift shop and then trapped back in some other room. The horizon line becomes the fill-to-here-line. Too much.
Yellow blue burning or not burning; Yves Klein's tape lends less melancholy here.. industrial mix+match leftover bin of blues... Klein's blue wasn't even "Yves Klein blue," in like the dye to match sense.... though the variation, fading, decay became some mark of the artist, museum crew. As the tape becomes the only thing to guide you along a narrowing corridor, even this kind of trace of the artist's hand becomes something of a companion. It doesn't occur to you to think about anything except the feeling of infinite isolation for so long, no possible connotations--from your own life or about the art--attach themselves to this duration-based act; and somehow anything that could have caught hold of you then and didn't is now lost forever.
This is what it means to lose an ability to play, I think. To be inhaled with a movement toward and propelled by a sub-matter quantity; cavities and interspliced synccopated lapses of nothing.
I forgot about Harold and the Purple Crayon. Oh and then the rock&roll version--children's theater sequel. With a whole box of colors and electric guitars.
This is the kind of cliche that it sort of seemed like a preferable thing to forclose on in the time between deciding against pursuing financial success and getting lost in an alternative trajectory. (Alternative in the side-by-side comparison sense).
So since you didn't go along to any of those things, with all luck you will have saved a fair amount of time, money and energy but will have followed my directions re. how to feel and relate to those experiences closely enough to agree that we are now in an immediately and already passed present future shared moment. One that has nothing to do with taking the time to fail repeatedly again, and thus requires nearly-immediate agreement and quick planning. I for one hope most to avoid success at all costs. Are we in agreement: yes.
How does such a sentiment, or goal, translate to an era that doesn't question such an obvious premise. Without some sort of glorification of failure, the symptoms are couched in a standing room only section with enough room for a sprawling shanty town for one.
St. Paul James J. Hill Library, Feb. 2012: directed toward the surplus woman corner at a literary Valentines dating event, I just couldn't get over how much cooler I was than anyone else in the room. There was a pretty good book selection in that corner-- a Santa Cruz book on permaculture or micro farms or something, and the little bit of smugness that comes from not partaking in something and having a really long complicated story to make it the place everyone wishes they were. Not really, actually. This cat vet kept mentioning my income. Apparently my number was that of a tax form or something.
Despite the glamor of the thing, I made a real effort to avoid letting the failure diva persona kind of continue to overcode the more realistic kind of isolation and rejection that's wrapped up with most social exchange these days... Maybe time to return to Welcome To The Desert Of The Real? (Zizeck, post 9-11).
